Category: TV & Movies

  • Ho Hum, Apple’s boring choices with TV+

    There’s a passage toward the end of Walter Isaacson’s majestic biography, Steve Jobs, about what was on the Apple founder’s mind as he was dying of cancer: He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an…

  • No algorithm for serendipity

    What do Mister Rogers and artificial intelligence have to do with each other?  This is a column about the nature of human expertise. That sounds like airy philosophy, but it’s actually an urgent practical question facing us as a species today because of the pressure that algorithms (artificial intelligences and machine learning) put on what we…

  • “Bohemian Rhapsody” is fantastic: what the critics missed

    The Bottom Line: Drop everything, turn off your phones and go see “Bohemian Rhapsody” immediately. The critics are wrong. It’s fantastic.  More details: I have a pet theory that critics—subject matter experts of all sorts, really—get so into the weeds of the production of the material they critique that they lose track of why ordinary…

  • Since when does Anthony Lane review NETFLIX “movies”?

    In the November 12 issue of The New Yorker, film critic Anthony Lane reviews both The Front Runner, a Gary Hart biopic starring Hugh Jackman, and Outlaw King, a Scottish period piece starring Chris Pine. (Link here, subscription required.) Lane is impressed with neither film. What surprised me about Lane’s Outlaw King review is that the film…

  • 2023: Why Comcast should worry

    For years I’ve thought that—while Comcast’s cable television business had a future that made polar bears wince in sympathy—its lock on the cable internet business made the company invulnerable. Sure, cord-cutting and cord-shaving are eroding cable TV. Younger people in particular, unless they are big sports fans, don’t bother to subscribe (cord-nevers). However, Comcast still…

  • Streaming superheroes and the DC Universe

    DC Entertainment — home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League and a part of the recent AT&T acquisition of Time Warner — has announced a new streaming video on demand service called DC Universe that will premiere in 2019. The service is a competitor to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and other Over…

  • What is a movie and why does it matter?

    Is the definition of a movie only a video presentation of a certain length, or is there more to it than that? The June 30th issue of The Economist featured an excellent cover story and short lead article about how Netflix is changing the entertainment industry with one disturbing sentence: “This year its entertainment output will far…

  • The half-life of brands: Amazon’s algorithmic strategy

    Although what comes next will offend generations of power-mad English teachers, red-pen-wielding copy editors, and Spelling Bee conquistadores, these days most people don’t need to learn how to spell. Spellcheck saves us from having to do work that we don’t care about and that we don’t have time to do anyway. Plus, more and more…

  • Will Oculus Go kill the TV set?

    Smart glasses, heads-up display, augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality: no matter what you call them, computer screens that you wear on your face are poised to change how we interact with information, the media we consume, and how much reality we share with people around us. It’s reasonable, for example, to expect that the…

  • Marvel’s new “Avengers: Infinity War” movie and the structure of special experiences

    Although at first this column will seem like a movie review, what I’m really after is a sense of what makes experiences special because we often mistake one part of an experience for the whole: we over-focus on the new thing, the concrete feature, and in doing so we miss the total shape of an…